Federal immigration policy crept into a conversation between two Chattanooga area leaders at a business group’s event Tuesday.
Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly and Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp spent a little over an hour answering questions at an East Brainerd Chamber of Commerce lunch — billed as the group’s second annual “Chatt with the Mayors” — at the Embassy Suites in Hamilton Place. They talked over some of their primary goals — career and technical education for Wamp and affordable housing for Kelly — along with local and national issues.
Both Wamp and Kelly said they hoped to keep the focus local in their administrations. But national concerns cropped up repeatedly in questions Tuesday, days after crowds gathered in Chattanooga, throughout the region and across the country to protest aspects of President Donald Trump’s political program, including his actions on immigration.
City, county mayors mull immigration enforcement
Toward the end of the lunch, an audience member referenced recent immigration enforcement activities, immigrant education and President Trump’s expanded travel ban before asking the mayors, “How do you see those national decisions affecting families, especially those who just try and work hard and stay together and contribute to their community?”
There were different focuses, but some common ground in their answers: Both Kelly, a political independent, and Wamp, a Republican, said that they favor deporting people who’ve committed violent crimes. That’s a stance they share with a majority of Americans, according to a March 2025 Pew Research Center poll. The poll found that 51% of Americans favored deporting some immigrants. Of that percentage, almost all – 97% – said the U.S. should deport violent criminals, and 52% said the U.S. should deport people who’ve committed nonviolent crimes.
But there were some differences in the mayors’ responses, too.
Kelly, who as the city’s mayor serves in a nonpartisan office, said things need to change.
“We need immigration reform in this country,” he said. “We’ve needed immigration reform in this country for the longest time.
“The terrible thing is that Mayor Wamp and I and local authorities are the ones having to deal with Congress’ unwillingness to do what they all know they need to do,” Kelly continued.
“The immigrants in our community and the communities across the country are essential to the functioning of our economy,” Kelly said. “I’m not saying that it’s OK that they broke the law coming here, but the answer is that if we deport them all, the economy would collapse.”
Immigration policy is set at the federal level. But Chattanooga area officials have played roles in enforcement as well, and aspects of it have changed with presidential administrations. The Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office transferred as many people into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in April as it did on average each year from 2021-24.
In Southeast Tennessee, both Hamilton and Bradley counties have agreed to work with federal immigration officials in a program that delegates some immigration enforcement powers to local law enforcement.
(READ MORE: Participation in ICE agreements mixed among rural Tennessee sheriffs)
Wamp said Trump’s policies aren’t necessarily a major break with the past.
“I would also say, there’s a place – and this is where I find most people in our community to be – a place to be sympathetic with the students at Eastside Elementary,” Wamp said. “I first volunteered at Eastside Elementary as a high school kid. You can be sympathetic to those families and then also frustrated by, for example, a few weeks ago in the criminal court in this county, a man here illegally strangled his wife to death – or his girlfriend – to death and was convicted of first-degree murder.”
Wamp was making an apparent reference to Jose Angel Rios Ramirez, who was convicted of killing his girlfriend earlier this year.
“First-degree murder convictions are very rare these days in Tennessee,” Wamp said. “And we should all be frankly offended that he was here in the first place, and I don’t think there’s a whole lot of people who would argue that efforts to identify and deport violent criminals is a good thing.
“We can honor and be kind to our neighbors and people who live in our community but then also … be supporters of the enforcement of laws in our country.”
Contact Mariah Franklin at mfranklin@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6354.